The recently released miniseries “The Fall of the House of Usher” marks the end of film and series creator Mike Flanagan’s (“Doctor Sleep”) extremely successful collaboration with Netflix. The collaboration was apparently not always easy …
It’s perfectly normal for the executives of a studio, broadcaster or streaming service to ask a filmmaker questions, make requests or give instructions, respectively, when they get to see the script or first cuts for a project. After all, they are the ones financing the whole thing, and the director, writer or showrunner is their employee. Most of the time, this correspondence is about finances. Every now and then, however, the executives interfere in matters of content.
For a long time, filmmakers such as David Fincher (“Mank,” “The Killer”) said that the streaming giant “just lets its creatives do their thing” and doesn’t interfere with them. With one of its biggest hit suppliers – Mike Flanagan, who brought Netflix mega-hits celebrated by subscribers and critics like “Haunted Hill House” or currently “The Fall of the House of Usher” – it was apparently different. This may also have contributed to the fact that he has now not renewed his long-term contract. Instead, the American signed with Amazon Studios and its streaming service Prime Video.
ABSURD IDEAS FROM NETFLIX SITE
After it was announced that he was leaving Netflix, Flanagan described his motivations in interviews. Most notably, he pointed out how a lot had changed at the company since he started there in 2016 due to various changes in leadership. Many of the people he worked with at the beginning left Netflix and were replaced by new ones who seemed to have different views. Which made Flanagan’s job more difficult.
The interference in his area of expertise was apparently particularly severe during the production of the miniseries “Midnight Mass,” which will be released in 2021. This revolves around a former investment banker named Riley (Zach Gilford). After serving four years in prison for causing a drunken car accident that resulted in his death, he returns to his hometown penniless. Soon mysterious things are going on there – paralleling the arrival of a new priest (Hamish Linklater).
Crucial to making the story work is that Riley has no prospects, no ambition, and no hope. He is mentally incapable of resisting his guilt, much less supernatural forces. Flanagan deliberately wrote it that way. However, the producers at Netflix were not very fond of the main character and kept sending the showrunner specific messages.
As Flanagan reported in a recent thread on the social media platform Bluesky, they couldn’t understand why Riley was so depressed and didn’t have a job. Flanagan responded that ex-convicts often have difficulty reintegrating into society in real life as well. But the executives couldn’t do anything with that explanation and told Flanagan how to “improve” the character.
“There were moments when I seriously wondered if my executives were drugged,” Flanagan says. “Just one small example: there was one guy in charge of ‘Midnight Mass’ who just couldn’t accept that Riley didn’t have a job. He told me ‘We should at least see him put up cover letters.’ I replied that yes, Riley would explicitly explain how he had lost all ambition in life,” Flangan continues. But that didn’t stop the Netflix employee from writing him to shoot a montage scene in which the character kept putting up new job applications.
What the man apparently didn’t consider was that such passages are expensive to produce. They have to be filmed on several locations, require different backdrops, ever new supporting actors, and so on. A clip of a few seconds in a montage also takes much longer to shoot than just a few moments – all of which costs a lot of money. When Netflix finally realized this fact, they changed their tune and only requested to insert dialogues about Riley filling out many applications. “I put some of those comments in the script and shot the scenes, too,” Flangan recalls. “Then in post-production, we cut them all out again. “
THE STUPIDEST SCENE EVER
But that was far from it. Because next, his clients insisted on wanting to make the pilot episode of “Midnight Mass” in particular even scarier. Netflix demanded to see a monster killing cats at the beginning. There should be no mystery about what happened to them – “an evil supernatural angel would be good,” they said, according to Flanagan.
“They put enormous pressure on me to put that scene in. I hated the idea, but they wouldn’t let up. In the end, I lost the battle. So now in the first episode, there’s this sequence where we follow a cat that’s just walking around. Then a POV shot comes through bushes and the animal is ripped out of frame. It’s like ‘Friday the 13th’ with cat – it’s the dumbest scene I’ve ever filmed. “
